Prefrontal Mega is a game which I have been developing recently. It is my first attempt at making a Sega MegaDrive (as I know it as a Brit)/Genesis game. The main game concept of the game is: can you avoid obstacles while also keeping track of some other targets which you have to shoot. This is a very challenging game to win the whole way through for somebody who is not familiar with this and is guaranteed to stretch your brain!

This uses the SGDK so the whole game is programmed in C. Honestly it is a relative pleasure to work with this. There is a dockerised toolchain which makes builds super easy.

It has been a lot of fun. I've been able to take advantage of some great classic effects such as using VDP line and tile scrolling to create some fun warping for example in this early video of the game.

On the titlescreen of this game, we have some great effects like a waving 'flag', where the waving effect is fully rendered by the console's VDP hardware. We're making egregious use of trigonometric tables to make this game work as the Motorola 68k does not support trigonometric functions.

As there is no sprite rotation, the space ship sprite is 'rotated' by essentially taking advantage of SGDK's sprite animation feature in combination with some sprite flipping rules. This results in a very convincing 'rotation' effect across 24 degrees of precision while only requiring 6 frames in the sprite sheet itself. Honestly we could probably take this further and make it more precise, but it does not seem to be necessary.

Similar techinques are used for moving projectiles around the screen based on an angle, in some cases I have used a full 360 degree pair of trigonometric tables.

If you play the game through perfectly, I do not expect that it would take you very long. However there is definitely some challenge in making it through all of the waves while only messing up 3 times.

In any case, I hope you give this a try if you are into genesis/megadrive homebrew.